Laura shrugged. “Thomasina died Tuesday, so… can’t be more than a day and a half. Kind of an improvement, right?” She tried to smile meekly, but probably looked like the crazy fashion girl of Detective Cangemi’s worst nightmares.
Ruby came at ten thirty. Laura had just signed herself out with her left hand. She had work to do for Jeremy, and she hadn’t seen the inside of her own showroom in a day and a half. She was sure not a sale had been missed because she wasn’t there. She was a little concerned about Debbie Hayworth, who undoubtedly would react less kindly to Ruby-boyfriend-stealer’s sales tactics. She had texted Stu four times and heard nothing back.
“Oh, that’s attractive,” Ruby said of the plastered arm. “Really. It doesn’t come in another color?”
“Feel free to sew me a new one. Oh, but never mind.”
Ruby stuck her tongue out at her. Of course she couldn’t sew.
Laura felt guilty. “How’s the showroom?”
“There’s no air conditioning vent. It smells like bodies.”
“Speaking of bodies…” Laura knew it was a tacky segue, but couldn’t help herself. “I have some new developments. Should we take a cab?”
“You have money?”
“I’m broke. How about the train?” She indicated her arm, which looked ridiculous and wouldn’t get its sleek waterproof cast for three days. “I think I can make it if I don’t walk on my hands. And if the train’s not too crowded.”
Laura recited the story as they walked east on 14th Street. She wanted to tell everything in order so she wouldn’t miss anything. That meant she didn’t mention their army of employees until the end.
“They work for who? For us?” Ruby’s brow knitted, and she got a faraway look, as if she was trying to remember hiring someone. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s all jumbled, and I don’t feel like we’re any closer to figuring it out.”
“Uncle Graham says he thinks they’re going to arrest me. I don’t think I could stand it.”
They arrived at the train station. Ruby slid Laura’s card through the reader and pushed her through the turnstile. The subway car was crowded for late night, and Laura’s arm took up way too much space. Even clubbers who wanted to be polite and give her a wide berth couldn’t, and she refused a seat because she’d end up jabbing the person next to her, a scraggly woman in her twenties with a laundry bag between her legs. With a look, the girl let Laura know there wasn’t any room for her and her cast.
“You won’t get convicted,” Laura said.
“Convicted?” Ruby asked as if she’d never considered the word, as though the word was so much more powerful than the idea of going to jail. Convicted. It did seem awfully strong.
“They have a bunch of circumstantial stuff, and if it was worth a dime, they would have arrested you already. I mean, it’s a celebrity poisoning. Every day that goes by without an arrest looks bad for them.” Laura realized what she’d said as the last word left her mouth. “Don’t worry, Ruby. We’ll figure it out.”
“We don’t have time. I wish I could just run away.”
They got off at Union Station and walked underground to the R train, a trek that was beginning to exhaust Laura completely. The girl with the laundry bag who had no room next to her for a girl with a broken arm went by at a good clip, the bag knocking against her leg and bumping Laura into Ruby. Laura sent a choice word at Laundry Lady’s back, but was ignored.
Laura missed Manhattan. The space in the house was nice, but the commute was killing her. Her life seemed to be getting harder instead of easier. “Did you ever give Thomasina any information about our business, like the EIN or anything like that?”
“No.”
“You swear?”
“We were doing other things.”
“Okay, never mind. Listen. It’s all pretty clear.” She pulled Ruby to a bench designed as a piece of art. She was tired, and she didn’t want to explain and get knocked around at the same time. “They were laundering girls through Sartorial. Like money.”
“What do you know about money laundering?”
“What’s the difference? They had these girls in deep trouble. Thomasina wanted to help them by giving them jobs and a new life.” Laura was sure her timeline was all messed up, but she couldn’t stop talking. “Rolf gets wind of it, and he’s in trouble with the law for being a skinhead, so he needs to get out of the country. But he can’t just partner with Thomasina. I don’t know why; I guess it was just too tempting to sell them into prostitution. I mean, how much of a stretch, right? So maybe that’s what Bob found out when he went to Germany. Maybe he didn’t like that. And one of two things happened. Either Ivanah was in it with Rolf and took on Susannah as an assistant to shut Bob up, or she wasn’t in on it and she hired Susannah because she wanted to be the first to make the right move.”
Laura shrugged. “In any case, who else had access to Sartorial’s information? And the power to utilize it? Enough to secretly sponsor foreign women? Ivanah and Bob, and we already know Bob didn’t like what he saw when he went out there. This leaves us with what?”
Ruby bent over and pressed her forehead between her knees. “Too much.”
“To me, the fact that all this was going on and you had nothing to do with it should be enough to keep you out of trouble.”
“I just want my life back.”
“I can get it for you. I mean, I can try. Tomorrow, Ivanah’s coming into the design room. I’ll see what I can get out of her. But tonight, I have to go apologize to Jeremy.”
Jeremy’s office was buzzing, even at eleven at night. The show was the next day, and no one was sleeping. Emira ran through the racks like a machine, moving garments and checking against a list that put the right giraffe with the right pair of pants. She was the designer who had replaced Carmella, the faux Italian countess, and was an organized workhorse short on innovation, but long on late hours and responsible partying. Tiffany was next to her, having survived the transition after the Pomerantz murder. Jeremy stood over Carlos, the cutter, who had a brown cowhide flat on the table.
“But I told you,” Jeremy said with the bite of a pit bull in his voice. “I told you in yesterday’s meeting, and I told you three hours ago. If the skin has hair, you cut with a razor.”
“It’s too short,” Carlos protested.
“If you want to spend the rest of your career cutting cotton poplin, Tollridge & Cherry is across the street, except their sample cutters live in China. How would that work out for you?”
Carlos just stared at the stretch of cowhide on the table.
Jeremy held up a trapezoid-shaped blade as if explaining the buttons on a remote control to an interplanetary alien. “This is the handle. This is the sharp part. This is tape to keep you from cutting yourself. Carlos, you ruin this skin because you’re afraid of getting cut, and I’m firing you. I know five guys more than happy to take your place.”
Jeremy glanced up at her and placed the blade in Carlos’s hand, turning his back on his cutter of seven years. He pointed at her broken arm. “What happened?”
“Lost a fight with a fire alarm.” His quizzical look forced her to elaborate. “I was chasing a pimp.”
He pulled her into the break room with a gravity she hadn’t seen from him in a long time. He was playing boss, even though he really wasn’t her boss but in the most casual way. He closed the door behind them and sat her in one of the red modernist chairs, helping with the busted arm.
“This is not the week to do this,” he said. “Not for me. I had to get Tony to cover the Yasmine pants.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“I’m not ready to move the technical stuff to Asia. They’re home patternmakers with a paycheck. I interview people in here to grow a tech department, and they need to manage people, a factory floor, and a pattern. I’m only getting two out of three.” He was deep in his own troubles.
“You’re trying to do too much.”
He didn’t even seem to hear her
. “Have you seen your sister?”
“Yeah, I—”
“She’s been running in here every hour. She’s in a panic. Your salesperson looks like a zombie. He doesn’t know who’s coming or going out of that showroom.”
“She didn’t say anything.” Laura got a sinking feeling, as though she’d missed an opportunity to do something right, and the failure couldn’t be undone.
“Yoni’s been calling me like a banshee. You have approvals pending and projections you need to organize. And if you want to tack onto my wool crepe, you’re going to need to get on it.”
“The past couple of days have been really hard. I saw another dead body. This time—”
“Stop.” He held up his hand, then covered her left with it.
“I don’t want Ruby to go to jail.”
“I don’t care.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She was ready to get offended, because offense was the opposite of defense, and she hated being on the defensive.
“You’re qualified to do one thing. Make clothes. That’s what you do.”
“I can still make clothes.”
“No, Laura, you can’t. You are running a business, and that business hangs on you. You are the life support. In a couple of seasons, you’re going to have employees whose jobs depend on you and how you act and how committed you are to what you’re doing. What you’re doing now is bailing. You worked too hard, and now you’re getting involved in something else because you’re burned out.”
“I don’t burn out.” She felt petulant and scolded. Obviously, he didn’t know her at all.
“No, you do burn out, just like everyone else. But you don’t collapse like everyone else. You don’t take a vacation or get drunk. You pour all that energy into something else you’re convincing yourself is important. But it’s not.”
“How is a murder and my sister getting accused of it not important?”
“Ivanah got Greyson?”
“They’re making it worse.”
“Your sister has a lawyer?”
“So?”
“And the NYPD?”
“I don’t understand how that—”
“If you’re doing their jobs, who’s making the clothes, Laura? Who’s running your business? You don’t have other priorities right now. You don’t have hobbies, and you don’t have responsibilities. You don’t have a life. This is your life. There’s not a kid coming out of Parsons right now who wouldn’t take what you have right out from under you. And none of them are going to look at the dead body on the side of the road. Not one.”
She couldn’t look at him, but kept her gaze on her lap, where his hand rested with her left hand. She became conscious of her right arm, stuck in the sling and weighing forty pounds, and she thought, How is this happening? How are we holding hands in my lap like it’s normal? She wondered if her hand would smell of his salt water, and if she’d fall asleep with her palm over her nose.
He continued, “Ivanah’s been strolling in and out, asking questions about where you are. You don’t have their backing yet is what Pierre tells me. Until there’s money in the bank, you have to prove you’re worth it, and when the checks clear, you can take half a day off. But you’re going to have to order fabric, and you’re going to be cleaned out because you’re going to have to sew the garments six months before a store is obligated to send you a check, and you’re going to have to prove you’re worth more money. You have to prove it every delivery, every season, every year.”
“This doesn’t sound anything like working for myself.”
“That’s a myth. We all work for someone.”
She looked up into his espresso eyes and thought of his history, his life, and wondered where he had gotten such an idea. “Who do you work for? You’re your own financing. You make your own decisions.”
“My boss is time.”
She immediately knew what he meant, haunted as he was by the specter of his fibrosis and a prognosis that didn’t stretch past his fortieth year. “Let me get some sleep, and I’ll come in tomorrow ready to go.”
“Ivanah’s coming with an assistant, so you need to be sharp and cheerful. She’s going to want to go to 40th Street, and my show’s tomorrow, so I can’t come and smooth things over. But you bring everyone tickets, and you show up to my show like you own it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ruby, too. She has to be available and sharp all day. She’s going to be fine if you let everyone do their jobs. If you aren’t on top of it this week, you’re failing her.”
“Okay.”
“Have fabric ready for Fall. And you can steal some of the magazines from my office for swipes.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t be scared.”
It was just one demand too many, even if it was for her own good. “Can you stop now, please? You don’t get to make out with me in the afternoon and then lecture me at night. You’re not my boss anymore, and it’s not like I know what you are anyway, but you don’t know everything about what I need.”
“What if I made out with you right now? Could I lecture you then?”
“No. First, you need to tell me what you want from me because it can’t be all business sometimes and… something else… other times.”
He let her hands go, and she felt the loss of his touch deeply. “What do I want from you? It hasn’t been obvious since the day we met? I treated you different from anyone else from the minute you walked in the door. We hung out for how many hours in the mornings? Do you think I wanted to show up at seven thirty every day? Hell, no. But you were there, so I was there. Jesus, I’m expanding all over the place, but I found a way to cut you a piece of my showroom. We’re tacking orders and sharing staff. What the fuck, Laura? You want something stupid like a card or flowers?”
“But it’s always business.”
“If I’m letting you into my business, I’m letting you into my life. You know that.”
There was a moment when they looked at each other and an understanding passed between them. This was who he was, and she could love him or leave him, but she knew what she was getting into.
Emira walked in before Laura had a chance to wiggle out of her predicament. “JJ, Carlos cut himself.” Seeing them so close seemed to catch her up short. “Oh. Ah, never mind? It’s not serious. He just wanted you to see it.”
Jeremy stood and helped Laura up so her cast wouldn’t catch her off balance. Then he took her left hand, knotting their fingers together. She squeezed with everything she had. He pulled her into the hallway with their hands knitted together for everyone in the design room to see.
As they stood waiting for the elevator, she said, “You don’t get to yell at me. I don’t like it.”
“I know.”
“You’re a real asshole. You’ve been toying with me for years.”
“What was I supposed to do? I took you any way I could have you.” The elevator doors slid open, and they stepped in.
“I can’t stand the sight of you,” she said.
When the doors shut, he put his arms around her, and he kissed her and said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” until she kissed him back.
CHAPTER 20.
The cab was clean. Probably the cleanest she’d seen in years. But wasn’t it just like Jeremy to stroll outside with a shaking girl and barely have his arm up before the cleanest cab in the city appeared for him? He was a magical person, but did she love him?
Her face burned from the fifteen minutes of kissing lips surrounded by stubble, fifteen minutes of pure thoughtless heaven, where it all went away. She defined “it” as the murder she’d seen that morning, or would have seen if she’d shown up ten minutes earlier. “It” was her sister in trouble and not allowed to go back to her own apartment without pulling up a closet floor. “It” was losing her business. “It” was Stu and his nobody-seems-to-mind-that-I’m-named-after-a-grocery-item-but-you girlfriend.
For fifteen minutes, all that mattered was his lips, his sme
ll, and his hands on her neck and back.
He never joked about her broken “humorous” or pressed for any more information about why she’d broken it. He considered it a distraction from what she should be doing and didn’t want to encourage her by asking questions. Or so he said. In the back of her mind, she feared he really didn’t care.
Or maybe he was right. How could she be great at anything if she kept spreading her energy around? Maybe she should leave the investigating to the lawyers and cops, who knew what they were doing.
“Drop me at the corner,” she said. She could walk a block to the house. For some reason, getting out of a cab with a cast on her arm and with a news van right there felt embarrassing.
She could see the van in the dark, a hulking white and blue thing with a satellite dish on top. As she made her way to the house, she found the big vehicle had a gravitational pull. She thought briefly about her deal with Stu and promised herself she would honor his exclusive right to the story, but she knew that the only people with more information, besides lawyers and cops, who were sworn to silence, were reporters.
Jeremy had told her to forget about it and go to bed, and she would, as soon as she did one thing. Then she was going to drop it like a bar of soap in the bathtub. She knocked on the back door of the news van.
Roscoe Knutt answered in a windowpane cotton shirt unbuttoned to his belly, revealing a marginally clean crewneck T-shirt. He was chewing a green sweet pea crispy salty thing when he said, “You’re making it too easy for me.”
“I aim to please.”
“What happened to your arm? Don’t tell me. Something to do with that kerfuffle on Park and 48th.”
“I don’t remember a kerfuffle.”
“Smoking too much pot, I’ll wager. Rots the short-term memory. Reduces your RAM.” He tapped his head so hard with his second finger she feared he’d make a hole. “Come on in if you’re coming in.”
The van was not what she expected. Sure, there were short circuit monitors and the requisite complete lack of space and dials and knobs all over the place. What she didn’t expect was the big screen propped up high with multiple Twitter feeds and flashing social media windows.
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